Mobile Terabyte: Seagate FreeAgent Solutions Roundup. Page 7

Not so long ago a terabyte was considered unrealistically large capacity that could only be possible on multi-drive arrays. Today singe hard disk drives of this size have become quite common. And of course, 1TB external solutions didn’t keep us waiting for long. Today we are going to talk about three solutions like that from Seagate FreeAgent family.

Disk Response Time

In this test IOMeter is sending a stream of requests to read and write 512-byte data blocks with a request queue of 1 for 10 minutes. The total number of requests processed by the HDD is over 60 thousand, so we get a sustained response time that doesn’t depend on the HDD’s buffer size.

This test makes it clear that the devices are all equipped with hard disk drives from Seagate (which is no wonder, actually). Seagate’s latest 3.5-inch HDDs behave oddly in this test, having a much higher response at writing than at reading. But surprisingly enough, the XTreme with FireWire interface has a normal write response which indicates deferred writing. So again, Seagate’s latest HDDs are indeed very odd.

The drives all have almost the same read response, the new models with USB interface being somewhat faster.